The Rainy Season
Page 26
I look up into Hien’s expectant face. ‘Miss Ella boyfriend today very handsome!’
‘Hien,’ I laugh, breathlessly, ‘you know I don’t have a boyfriend!’
November, 1969
The pressure in the cabin changes as the plane begins its descent and somehow it comes as afresh shock, as if there’d still been some hope they’d circle Saigon and turn back. He buckles his seatbelt and swallows the saliva that keeps pooling in his mouth.
He finds himself humming the national anthem – Scatter thine enemies, And make them fall – and thinking about his dad; about his lap, and how, as a small boy, it was the best place in the world to be. He wishes he could give himself up to his fate.
He reminds himself, as he does now each waking hour, of the blokes who don’t get to see much action, who come home with ringworm and a thirst for beer – like John’s mate, who said it was a breeze. He tries not to think of the other stories, the bad ones, or the jerky army flicks about the Cong and their wily ways. He’ll be like John’s mate: two arms and two legs. Man just walked on the moon for chrissakes – Vietnam can’t be that bloody hard.
His ears pop. He clears his throat, swallows again. The bloke beside him seems – incredibly – to have nodded off; maybe he hopes he’ll wake and it’ll all be over.
And so he shuts his own eyes, shuts out the plane, the men, the whole thing; zooms in close on his baby girl. During his last leave he got to bathe her for the first time. Four months old – this perfect, mind-blowing thing. Each night since, after lights out, he’s replayed it in his head: unwrapped her fat grub body from its swathes of cotton and held her gently afloat in the warm water, her black eyes gazing straight back at his.
It’s kept him going. He does it now.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Olga Lorenzo – in whose RMIT class this story began – for her guidance and support. Thank you to my agent, Jacinta di Mase, and publisher, Ali Watts, for taking the novel on, and to my editor, Belinda Byrne, for making it so much better. Thanks to Kate Ryan, Rachel Jones and Tessa Keegal for providing feedback on multiple drafts.
Many thanks to Barry Heard for advice on material about the Vietnam War; to Nguyen Tuyet Nhung for correcting my Vietnamese; and to Christa Gockel for lugging a suitcase full of newspapers from Saigon to Melbourne. Thank you to my sister, Miriam Rosenbloom, for designing the cover – and to all my family and friends, for the big and small ways you have supported me in writing this book.
And thank you, finally, to James, Marlon and Llewellyn, for your patience and trust. Thank you also, James, for being my first reader, and for always understanding exactly what I am trying to say. I cannot express how grateful I am to you three.